Dropbox says it plans Austin operations

Wednesday

Dropbox Inc., a widely used online file storage and sharing service, said Tuesday that it plans to open a sales and customer support office in downtown Austin in about a month.

The 6-year-old San Francisco-based startup is believed to be the largest of the online data storage services, which enables users to securely share everything from baby videos to critical business documents with other users on a wide range of smart devices.

The company, backed by $257 million in investment, has grown from about 4 million users in early 2010 to an estimated 175 million today. While most of its users are individuals, the company is pushing to bring the service to both large and small businesses. And that is where the Austin office fits in.

Zhenya Loginov, who will lead the "landing team" that gets the Austin office started, said he expects it will have 20 to 30 workers by the end of this year handling both sales and customer support. The company will look for both experienced professionals and recent college graduates to fill job openings.

"We are excited to go to Austin because of all that great talent that we see in the city," Loginov said. "It has such a great tech culture, which is similar to the (San Francisco) Bay area culture."

Sales workers in the Austin office will primarily sell to businesses in the Central and Eastern United States. Loginov did not say how much its Austin workers will be paid, but said they have a chance to be part of the long-term plans of a fast-growing company.

Austin is the company’s second expansion outside of San Francisco. It announced plans for an office in Dublin, Ireland, last year.

"We are going after companies of all sizes," Loginov said.

Dropbox was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, who were both MIT students at the time. Houston is now the company’s CEO and Ferdowsi is its chief technology officer. Experts say part of the company’s early growth stems from its ability to take a technically difficult task, securely sharing the same file among many different devices, and make it look easy.

The company has a range of potential competitors including Apple’s iCloud, Google Drive and Microsoft Skydrive, but none of them appear to have attracted the numbers of users that Dropbox has.

It struck an agreement with Taiwan-based smartphone maker HTC to preinstall its software on HTC mobile devices.

And in April it announced that Yahoo Mail users can save their email attachments to Dropbox and access their Dropbox accounts from within their Yahoo email. Yahoo has an estimated 300 million email users.

The company’s site for potential new hires is dropbox.com/austin and it opens on Wednesday.

Dropbox works on a "freemium" concept with consumers, who get to use 2 gigabytes of storage in the Dropbox cloud for free, but must pay if they use more. But users who refer more users to Dropbox can use more storage space for free. Its business service starts at $795 a year for a company with five users. The business service features stronger security and more administrative management tools.

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